1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to portable wireless terminal devices, such as portable telephones, which have a rectangular display screen.
2. Description of the Related Art
Portable telephones have made enormous progress in recent years as portable information processing terminal devices having not only a telephone communications function but also a mail function, an internet function and a camera function and adapted to process a wide variety of information. Efforts are recently made to develop portable telephones having a television broadcast receiving function (see, for example, JP-A No. 1999-215217).
Common portable telephones have a vertically elongated case to ensure portability. The case has a receiver at the upper end of the front side thereof, a transmitter at the lower end of the front side, and a plurality of manual keys and a display in the region between the receiver and the transmitter. The display is in the form of a vertically elongated rectangle in conformity with the vertically elongated shape of the case. When the portable telephone having such a vertically elongated display is given the television broadcast receiving function to present television broadcast images on the display screen, a black strip appears on the upper and lower sides of the screen, giving rise to the problem that the screen cannot be used in its entirety for displaying images, because the received images have a horizontally elongated rectangular contour corresponding to the aspect ratio of horizontally elongated television receiver screens.
For example, FIGS. 15 and 16 show a portable telephone which is proposed to overcome the above problem and wherein a flip portion 92 is supported by a first pivot 94 and a second pivot 95 on a main portion 91 (see JP-A No. 2001-169166). With this telephone, the main body 91 has a plurality of manual keys 96 on the front side thereof and a transmitter 98 below the arrangement of keys 96. The flip portion 92 is provided with a display 93 having a vertically elongated rectangular screen on the front side thereof and a receiver 97 above the display 93.
When the wireless telephone function of the above portable telephone is utilized in the case where the telephone is adapted to serve the television broadcast receiving function, the screen of the display 93 is positioned as vertically elongated as shown in FIG. 15, while when the television broadcast receiving function is activated, the flip portion is turned about the first pivot 94 and the second pivot 95 to position the display screen as horizontally elongated as shown in FIG. 16. This makes it possible to display the received images over the entire screen of the display 93.
However, when the display 93 is positioned face-to-face with the user for the user to watch television broadcast as shown in FIG. 16, the manual keys 96 on the main portion 91 will face sideways as viewed by the user. The conventional telephone shown in FIG. 15 accordingly has the problem that the keys 96 are difficult to manipulate for a change of channel or in response to an incoming call since the keys are not positioned face-to-face with the user.